Security Systems News - david bywaterhttp://securitysystemsnews.com/taxonomy/term/6844
enVivint outgrows its Innovation Centerhttp://securitysystemsnews.com/article/vivint-outgrows-its-innovation-center
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<div class="field-item even">It is moving to a new facility three times larger than the one it opened last year</div>
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<div class="field-item even" property="schema:datePublished dc:date"><span class="date-display-single" property="schema:datePublished dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2014-01-15T00:00:00-05:00">01/15/2014</span></div>
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<div class="field-item even" rel="schema:author dc:creator">Tess Nacelewicz</div>
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<div class="field-item even" property="schema:articleBody content:encoded"> <p>LEHI, Utah—One year after opening a 30,000-square-foot Innovation Center here, Vivint has outgrown its current facility and is now planning to move the center to a new building nearby that’s about three times the size of the existing center.</p>
<p>Vivint announced the opening of its new <a href="http://www.securitysystemsnews.com/article/vivint-gets-rd" target="_blank">Innovation Center</a> in early 2013.</p>
<p>However, said David Bywater, Vivint COO, “We outgrew it, so we’re just … getting much more space.” He said the new 100,000-square-foot center being built at Thanksgiving Point should be ready for occupancy this summer and will allow Vivint to double the size of the center’s staff.</p>
<p>Shortly after it opened last year, the staff consisted of about 50 hardware, software and radio engineers, industrial designers and user-experience professionals.</p>
<p>The fact that Vivint, a leading home automation/home security provider based in Provo, Utah, is expanding its Innovation Center shows how important innovation is to the company, Bywater said.</p>
<p>“We’re very committed to it,” he told Security Systems News. “Innovation is core to our business. We understand that if we don’t out innovate, we’ll die. We view innovation as our life blood and take it very seriously.”</p>
<p>He said that at the center, “we’re trying to deliver on known needs, perceived needs or unperceived needs, but [they’re all] real needs of our customers. It’s a phenomenal place. You walk through there and it is just real electric energy, creating solutions for customer needs.”</p>
<p>He said that at the center, staff work on “new products that are core to our platform, [ones] that are tangential to our platform, as well as new business offerings.”</p>
<p>Vivint, which was bought by The Blackstone Group in 2012 for more than $2 billion, has been <a href="http://www.securitysystemsnews.com/article/vivint-grows-its-infrastructure-along-its-business" target="_blank">growing its infrastructure</a> since then along with its business.</p>
<p>For example, last summer, it doubled the size of its home Provo campus with a 100,000-square-foot new building there, bringing its total square footage in Utah to 395,000 square feet.</p>
<p>The Lehi location is about halfway between Provo and Salt Lake City. That site for the Innovation Center “allows us to draw technical talent from both Utah County—Provo is in Utah county—and Salt Lake County,” Bywater said.</p> </div>
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<span property="dc:title" content="Vivint outgrows its Innovation Center" class="rdf-meta element-hidden"></span>Wed, 15 Jan 2014 16:51:55 +0000Leah Hoenen17135 at http://securitysystemsnews.comhttp://securitysystemsnews.com/article/vivint-outgrows-its-innovation-center#commentsVivint hires former Alcoa exec as CFOhttp://securitysystemsnews.com/article/vivint-hires-former-alcoa-exec-cfo
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<div class="field-item even" property="schema:datePublished dc:date"><span class="date-display-single" property="schema:datePublished dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2013-10-11T00:00:00-04:00">10/11/2013</span></div>
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<div class="field-item even" property="schema:articleBody content:encoded"> <p>PROVO, Utah—Vivint today announced the appointment of Mark Davies, former EVP at Alcoa, as the company's new chief financial officer. As CFO, Davies will lead Vivint's financial teams, streamline processes and draw on his extensive experience with financial strategy to create business plans for Vivint's investments, funding sources and financial transactions, according to a news release.</p>
<p>The hire marks the fourth time this year that Vivint has gone outside the security industry to add to its executive team. Newcomers to the industry now fill the roles of COO, chief information officer and chief innovation officer at Vivint.</p>
<p>“We're excited to have Mark on the team,” Alex Dunn, president of Vivint, a home security/home automation provider based here, said in a prepared statement. "His skills and experience leading large, publicly held companies will be invaluable as we continue to grow. We're confident that he will be able to take Vivint's financial interests and investments to the next level."</p>
<p>Before joining Vivint, Davies worked at Alcoa, a leading producer of primary and fabricated aluminum. He served as the executive vice president and president of global business services, the chief procurement officer, and as a member of the executive council, according to the news release.</p>
<p>Prior to Alcoa, Davies served as managing vice president of strategic programs for Dell Inc. and helped lead the company's global business transformation, the news release said. He also served as the chief financial officer of Dell's Global Consumer Group, a $13 billion enterprise with operations in five regions and 45 countries. He has also worked for Hewlett Packard in financial operations, manufacturing, supply chain, procurement, and accounting for a number of international operations.</p>
<p>“I'm excited to join a company as dynamic as Vivint,” said Davies said in a prepared statement.</p>
<p>Vivint also recently hired former Xerox executive <a href="http://www.securitysystemsnews.com/article/vivint-gets-new-coo-outside-industry" target="_blank">David Bywater</a> as COO, and also <a href="http://www.securitysystemsnews.com/blog/vivint-gets-new-cio" target="_blank">Todd Thompson</a>, who hails from the hotel and airline industries, as its new chief information officer. Earlier this year, Vivint hired <a href="http://www.securitysystemsnews.com/article/vivint-disruptive-innovation-key-success" target="_blank">Matthew Eyring</a>, a prominent business strategy consultant, for a newly created position of chief innovation officer.</p>
<p>Vivint’s former CFO, <a href="http://www.securitysystemsnews.com/also-noted/former-vivint-cfo-joins-viamedia" target="_blank">Chris Black</a> left the company in December after The Blackstone Group purchased Vivint for more than $2 billion. He’s now CFO at Viamedia.</p> </div>
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<span property="dc:title" content="Vivint hires former Alcoa exec as CFO" class="rdf-meta element-hidden"></span>Fri, 11 Oct 2013 18:03:26 +0000Tess Nacelewicz16880 at http://securitysystemsnews.comhttp://securitysystemsnews.com/article/vivint-hires-former-alcoa-exec-cfo#commentsVivint gets new COO—from outside the industryhttp://securitysystemsnews.com/article/vivint-gets-new-coo-outside-industry
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<div class="field-item even">David Bywater and other outside hires bring ‘really good perspectives’ to Vivint, President Alex Dunn says</div>
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<div class="field-item even" property="schema:datePublished dc:date"><span class="date-display-single" property="schema:datePublished dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2013-09-11T00:00:00-04:00">09/11/2013</span></div>
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<div class="field-item even" rel="schema:author dc:creator">Tess Nacelewicz</div>
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<div class="field-item even" property="schema:articleBody content:encoded"> <p>PROVO, Utah—Vivint has a new COO: former Xerox executive David Bywater. The recent hire marks the third time this year that Vivint has gone outside the industry to add to its executive team.</p>
<p>Hiring an industry outsider is not necessarily a goal of Vivint, but it can be beneficial, Alex Dunn, president of the home automation/home security provider, which is based here, told Security Systems News.</p>
<p>“We’re just trying to build the best team possible, find the best people possible, and if they come from outside the industry that’s something we’re OK with,” Dunn said. “And a lot of times they bring really good perspectives to the company, so it’s a benefit.”</p>
<p>Dunn said that is the case with Bywater, who most recently was an EVP and corporate officer for Xerox and COO of its $1.8 billion state government services division. Bywater formerly worked for Affiliated Computer Services (ACS), which Xerox acquired in 2009.</p>
<p>“One of the things we’re trying to do as we fill out the executive team to make sure we have people that the company is going to grow into, and not have people that grow into the company, just because we’re growing so fast,” Dunn said. “We’re very lucky to get [Bywater], and his experience in running very large organizations at Xerox is going to be helpful as we grow the business to help us get to where we want to get to.”</p>
<p>Bywater told SSN that he has known Vivint CEO Todd Pedersen for more than a decade and greatly admires the success of Vivint, which was <a href="http://www.securitysystemsnews.com/article/blackstone-closes-vivint-purchase" target="_blank">purchased by The Blackstone Group last year for more than $2 billion</a>. </p>
<p>“I think Vivint has got great momentum and I’m really impressed with what they’ve done,” Bywater said. He said his “goal is to help accentuate that” and scale the business and make it stronger as it grows.</p>
<p>Dunn previously held the position of COO but Vivint announced early this year that it had <a href="http://www.securitysystemsnews.com/also-noted/vivint-gets-new-president" target="_blank">promoted him to president</a>. </p>
<p>Around that same time, Vivint <a href="http://www.securitysystemsnews.com/article/vivint-disruptive-innovation-key-success" target="_blank">hired Matthew Eyring in the newly created position of chief innovation officer</a>. Eyring, formerly a prominent business strategy consultant, also came from outside the security industry.</p>
<p>Then this summer, Vivint <a href="http://www.securitysystemsnews.com/blog/vivint-gets-new-cio" target="_blank">hired a new chief information officer</a>, Todd Thompson, who hails from the hotel and airline industries. </p>
<p>Bywater, who started his job in the middle of July, was the next hire. Bywater said he and Eyring were classmates at Harvard Business School, where they both earned MBA degrees.</p>
<p>Bywater said it’s not uncommon for executives in one industry to become executives in another. For example, he noted, Delta Air Lines CEO Richard Anderson formerly was EVP of UnitedHealth Group.</p>
<p>And in the decade Bywater spent working for ACS/Xerox, he ran more than 65 different service companies, which he said were extremely diverse and whose revenues ranged from $10 million per year to more than $400 million per year. And he ran many of them at the same time.</p>
<p>“I had never run any of those businesses,” Bywater told SSN. “I had never been an HR expert running a large benefits administration business, I had never run a corporate learning company before, I had never run the largest Medicaid business in the country, I had never run the largest child support services business in the country. … And most people would say, ‘How can you do [that] and do it an excellent way if you weren’t raised in that industry?’”</p>
<p>He said that answer is that “the core principles to growing and running an incredible company” are the same from business to business. “How do you attract and motivate people, how do you put the right process in place, the correct strategy, and bring your resources to bear to achieve that strategy, how do you do right by your customers, how do you scale and grow, how do you foster a culture of innovation?” All businesses need to answer those questions to be successful, he said.</p>
<p>Bywater said that 80 percent of any business involves those common principles and the remainder is “the particulars.” He added, “The beautiful thing about Vivint is that they have so many people that know the particulars of security and home automation, they are the experts there. I believe I bring the expertise on how you grow a company.”</p>
<p>Bywater, who also has a bachelor’s degree in economics from Brigham Young University, is in charge of the daily operations of Vivint, “including customer operations, human resources, field service, and supply chain,” the company said in a news release.</p>
<p>Vivint doesn’t just hire from outside the industry. Todd Santiago, formerly president of 2GIG Technologies who also has a Harvard MBA, recently joined Vivint as chief sales officer. 2GIG was <a href="http://www.securitysystemsnews.com/article/nortek-buy-2gig-135m" target="_blank">acquired by Nortek </a>earlier this year.</p>
<p>“Our executive team is one of the reasons Vivint is a success,” Pedersen said in a prepared statement. “During the 13 years we’ve been in business, Vivint has become one of the fastest growing companies in our industry. I have high expectations that with the talent and drive we’re bringing to the team, the goals we’ve already achieved are just the beginning.”</p> </div>
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<span property="dc:title" content="Vivint gets new COO—from outside the industry" class="rdf-meta element-hidden"></span>Wed, 11 Sep 2013 19:25:33 +0000Leah Hoenen16775 at http://securitysystemsnews.comhttp://securitysystemsnews.com/article/vivint-gets-new-coo-outside-industry#comments